Wednesday, 22 January 2014

Some months later...

Last winter, I ended a
blog post with a breezy promise to confide in you the techniques I used to
learn 60 plus minutes of monologue for my solo show; an English version of
M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A by Lena Kitsopoulou. Perhaps you read that promise. Perhaps you
believed it, or even anticipated the big reveal; unlikely, but possible.
Perhaps you even checked occasionally, as digital dust drifted out of the void
to settle on these neglected pages, as the pause grew longer and longer and was
revealed as silence.

I’m sorry.

I’ve been known to
complain that theatre-makers rarely show process in their blogs; the wrong
turns, the frustration, the bickering, the doubts. How much better it would be,
I railed, if all the vulnerability and stupidity and mess were out in the open,
so people understood that no-one’s work is effortless, unflawed, pristine –
everything has life’s grubby fingerprints all over it. That’s how the light
gets in.

And then I started
working on my show, the show it had taken me a year and a halfand weeks and weeks of translating (and two
directors whose schedules didn’t quite fit before I found a marvellous one who
gloriously had just enough time) to get to start
work on. And I was frustrated and scared and angry with myself and stupid and
vulnerable and full of doubt. And I couldn’t bear to tell you what a fraud I
was.

So time passed, and we
were rehearsing and more time passed, during which the backlog of
M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A work that I’d have to tell you about before I got to the bit we
were working on just then got longer and longer. And posterous closed down, so
maintaining my blog suddenly meant uploading all that stuff all over again and
consequently became even more daunting, and in the middle of it all the
all-female theatre company we were talking about starting became a show and a
performance date and there was so much to blog about I didn’t know where to
start and here we are.

The blog is still a mess,
and most of the links are broken. I don’t know when I’ll get around to
fixing it up. I don’t know if I’m
going to write about learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I don’t know if I’m going to
write about the whole warty process of re-learning a show you’ve only performed
once, some 10 months after that one performance. I don’t know what I’m going to
write about, and I’m not making any any promises. Except…. I promise to write.
To keep on writing.